New England Journal of Public PolicyVolume 26Issue 1 Special Issue on Education Article 6

9-22-2014

The National Commission on EducationExcellence and Equity: Hypotheses aboutMovement BuildingChristopher Edley Jr.University of California Berkeley School of Law

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Recommended CitationEdley, Christopher Jr. (2014) "The National Commission on Education Excellence and Equity: Hypotheses about MovementBuilding," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 26: Iss. 1, Article 6.Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol26/iss1/6

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The National Commission on Education Excellence and Equity:

Hypotheses about Movement Building

Christopher Edley Jr.

University of California Berkeley School of Law

In 2013, the congressionally chartered national Commission on Education Equity and Excellence

issued unanimous recommendations for P–12 policy changes at the federal, state, and local

levels. This remarkably broad consensus, with unusual pragmatism and concreteness, is

comprehensive in its scope and predominantly research based. As a clarion call and reform

strategy, the commission report, For Each and Every Child, is a successor to A Nation at Risk

(1983); the commission’s grand if not grandiose intention was to provide a framework for the

next decade or more of nationwide policy struggle. This article, after briefly summarizing the

recommendations, focuses on how a movement might be built to advance them.

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Since the publication, in 1983, of A Nation at Risk, the dominant engineering principles in

initiatives to bring about systemic school improvement have been stronger curriculum standards,

accountability based on standardized student tests, quasi-market incentives, shame-based public

reporting, and a refocusing of regulatory attention on outputs rather than inputs. The public value

most often invoked, it seems, has been prosperity, with competitiveness its measure. This

approach has had some success, but far from enough. In February 2011, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appointed members to the

congressionally chartered national Commission on Education Equity and Excellence to make

recommendations to the Department of Education and the nation to improve public P–12 systems.

The commissioners, each expert and prominent in the field, included academic and policy

researchers, current and former education officials from all levels of government, civil rights

leaders, the presidents of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education

Association, education policy advocates and associations, and public interest lawyers. Also

serving, ex officio, were subcabinet education officials from the department and the Obama White

House. As the work unfolded, the commission concluded that its central task, thirty years after A

Nation at Risk, was to propose a reformulation of purpose and strategy for the myriad federal,

state, and local efforts to improve education outcomes for our children and the nation.

After two years of deliberation, drafting, and negotiation, the commission adopted over

fifty pages of analysis and recommendations for work at all levels of government. The report, For

Each and Every Child, was unanimous—an unexpected and noteworthy accomplishment. The

report includes a clarion call and five policy categories encompassing scores of evidence-based

recommendations, proffered as guidance—a polestar—for a decade and more of struggle to come.

Put quite broadly, those categories are (1) funding equity and efficiency; (2) teachers, principals,

and curriculum; (3) early childhood education; (4) further mitigation of poverty’s effects; and (5)

governance and accountability.

Christopher Edley is the faculty director of the Warren Institute for Law & Social Policy and the

Honorable William H. Orrick Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law

and chair of Partners for Each & Every Child.

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In view of the unanimity of so many influential voices, several former commissioners and

donors are mounting a follow-on effort, Partners for Each and Every Child (PEEC), to build

infrastructure for a “movement”—vaguely defined—that will connect and support myriad reform

efforts nationwide, provided they are generally aligned with the policy polestar. The provenance

of this effort, together with the comprehensiveness of the policy framework, makes it uniquely

promising. A premise of PEEC is that we have a rare moment of great opportunity. But how are

we to make the most of it?

Policy consensus aside—though that is no minor matter—the challenge is to design a

movement strategy appropriate to the complex structure of our P–12 system and the messiness of

the multilevel, multisubject policy reform ecosystem. Analogies seem largely inapt, so such a

design must in a sense be only a hypothesis about what might work, its plausibility a matter of

judgment more than science. That hypothesis is the subject of this article. We begin, however,

with a severe summary of the commission’s proposed framework of policy principles.

The Policy Polestar

The commission’s report starts with a familiar clarion call. It cites achievement, attainment, and

resource data, in the aggregate and highlighting disparities—demographic, geographic, and

international. It declares moral imperatives and also more instrumental imperatives related to

prosperity and social cohesion. Some of this is predicate for policy design, but much of it is useful

primarily to motivate action or influence beliefs and values. Prosaically, these data and arguments

inform the message strategies so often vital to policy or political change. Those strategies are

beyond the scope of this article.

More relevant to movement design are the extensive framework of policy principles and

scores of interrelated programmatic recommendations, which together constitute a polestar to

guide federal, state, and local reform efforts over the next decade or more. (Readers familiar with

the commission’s report should skip this section. Others are encouraged to peruse the full report.)

It is often remarked that educators and their immediate leaders are victims of an unceasing

barrage of “reforms” dropped from on high, generally with narrow, uncoordinated purposes. The

commission’s work, however, was comprehensive and coherent. The vision and recommendations

reflect an understanding that structures, organizations, and fundamental conditions matter—that

systems must change, not just isolated practices.

A few highlights of the recommendations follow. See Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1. Policy polestar consisting of comprehensive recommendations supporting a central value

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Figure 2. Core values animating the policy recommendations

Equitable, sufficient, and efficient school finance systems that ensure that a child’s

critical opportunities are not a function of his or her zip code. The federal government should

support states and districts in (a) determining the cost of providing meaningful educational

opportunities and high achievement, including human and other resources; (b) implementing a

system that ensures this adequate funding; and (c) providing additional funding for schools with

high concentrations of low-income students. The performance of these systems must be

monitored to ensure that they support achievement for all students. Relatedly, states should

identify and report on the programs and resources needed to provide all students a meaningful

education, ensuring that their systems of funding schools are supported by stable and predictable

sources of revenue. States should also develop information systems that will track student

achievement based on their needs and access to resources. With these and related

recommendations, the commission went beyond the requirements most typically found in state

constitutions as interpreted by the courts. As a matter of policy, if not constitutional law, the

equity and excellence we expect is possible only if allocation of resources responds to the

particular needs of students and the levels of achievement required for career and college

readiness.

Teachers, principals, and curriculum effective enough to provide each and every

child with the educational opportunity necessary for him or her to thrive and the nation to

prosper. The state and federal governments should initiate major new programs, including federal

funding incentives, to address the teacher quality pipeline as a whole, with a focus on educator

support and effectiveness. This funding includes investments in high-quality residency and

scholarship programs to create a steady supply of effective teachers in high-needs areas. The U.S.

Department of Education can demand equitable access to qualified and effective teachers using its

existing enforcement authority under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Titles I and II

of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965—most recently reauthorized in 2002 as

the No Child Left Behind Act. A new model of educator responsibility, the commission argues,

should consider requiring states to set a uniform entry “bar” into teaching, create a teacher quality

index for reporting on student access to effective teachers, and include technology support for

team teaching and professional development.

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States and districts must adopt best practice models for evaluating teacher effectiveness,

such as the MET (measures of effective teaching) framework, and integrate those into equity

analyses and accountability systems for teachers and administrators. State and local policies and

requirements of course-taking and graduation should focus on student access to rigorous material

and common standards; these measures require high-quality data systems.

The commission was unanimous in noting the critical role of the Common Core State

Standards in supporting excellence for all, but this universality will be achieved only if Common

Core implementation is effective for all. For example, all children deserve teachers who have been

supported in the mastery of new standards, and the Common Core must be implemented not as

just a Band-Aid-with-new-tests; effective implementation requires whole-school redesign of how

teachers interact, how instruction is delivered, and how extended learning time is shaped, with

equitable resource distribution and more.

Early childhood education. A remarkably strong research consensus has emerged that

early childhood programs with an academic focus, designed to narrow the disparities in readiness

when children reach kindergarten, are an indispensable component of enhancing K–12 excellence,

especially in narrowing the poverty-related disparities in readiness-to-learn in the early grades.

The report recommends a federal matching program to encourage states to create guaranteed

access to high-quality early learning programs for all low-income children within the next ten

years; alignment and coordination of federal early childhood programs (Head Start, Early Head

Start, etc.), and of federal, state, and local funding streams, should enable state and local

governments to coordinate services for their youngest students. Apart from funding, this basket of

recommendations poses enormous implementation challenges. In particular, there are difficult

obstacles to overcome in preparing the necessary teacher work force and ensuring that the

programs have sufficient fidelity to the research-based models to produce the hoped-for gains in

child outcomes.

Further mitigation of poverty’s effects. High-quality early childhood education is the

most important intervention to mitigate the impact of poverty, but other measures are useful once

the child is in school, continuing through high school. Generally, these include a range of

education, social, and health support services necessary to promote student success and family

engagement in school. “More and better learning time” is an important example, especially

because many existing models of supplemental education services are simply not successful

enough. There are models for more effective interventions to improve outcomes for student

groups especially likely to be left behind—including English language learners, children in Indian

country or isolated rural areas, children with special education needs, and students involved in the

child welfare or juvenile justice systems.

More specifically, at all levels, governments should align their school finance systems to

partner with public agencies and community-based organizations to improve the quality of the

educational experience of students in high-poverty communities and schools. Examples include

supporting dropout prevention programs and high-quality alternative education, promoting broad-

based parent engagement, and developing mechanisms to provide basic health and social services

to at-risk students—wraparound and in-school services can be effective approaches. Several

models for so-called community schools seem promising.

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Accountability and governance. Reforms in this arena must clarify who is responsible

for what. They must attach consequences and supports for student performance, coupled with

needed opportunities and resources. From teachers and students all the way up to state and federal

policymakers, everyone should be empowered but then held responsible. Accountability should

use multiple broad measures that fairly reflect the performance or actions of students, educators,

schools—including charter schools—and school systems. We must never have high stakes

accountability for students but little or no accountability for the adults. Finally, it bears emphasis

that a statutory or regulatory goal without an effective regime for accountability or enforcement

may be little more than an empty aspiration.

This is key: The specific policy ideas offer little novelty, because the commission insists

that its recommendations be supported by research and experience, rather than invocation of

ideology, supposition, intuition, or polling data. Instead, the novelty is that a coalition as strong,

expert, and diverse as the commission came together to recognize the interdependence of the

framework’s many components and found sufficient common ground to fashion a coherent and

near-comprehensive agenda for federal, state, and local efforts. And, unlike A Nation at Risk, the

report describes an integrated strategy to take on the challenge of excellence for all. It explains

why successful reform depends not only on standards and assessments but also on attention to the

critical dimensions of teaching, learning, organization, student supports, and efficient use of

sufficient resources.

The scores of commission recommendations can in many respects be understood as an

elaboration of the implementation requirements one might derive from the central commitment,

captured in the report’s title, to provide an effective instructional strategy and learning experience

for each and every child. Moreover, properly understood, this commitment helps create the

needed unity of excellence and equity goals.

From Ecosystem to Movement: Definition and Obstacles

One might adopt any of several descriptive models for a movement to advance education

excellence for all. An intellectual or philosophical movement should engage at the most

fundamental level the contested values and political ideologies and combine these with a coherent

critique of the United States’ racial and socioeconomic structures. Widely shared policy

consensus in some sense represents a movement or the fruits thereof. Victory is reified as

conventional wisdom, and its achievement may be the result of a strategic conspiracy or of a less

intentional organic aggregation of opinion, informed or otherwise. A populist grassroots

movement would be brought about by effective strategies for mobilizing the passionate

participation of individual citizens and community activists in a large number of places around the

country, effective communication to engage the broader public, and the capacity to bring

significant political pressure to bear on decision makers. Movements sometimes have a visionary

and charismatic leader, or a set of them. They generally have a coherent focus on what they are

against or what they are for.

For my purposes, however, movement means a blending of these models. But the recipe

depends on the characteristics of the ecosystem from which a movement arises, and the resources

available to it and its opponents.

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The ecosystem of education reform1 is remarkably complex.

It is a governance and finance nightmare, with authority distributed between federal,

state, and county policymakers, as well as over fifteen thousand school districts. This

fragmentation, especially the role of localism, is often praised and even romanticized.

The problems it creates, however, are epic. Knowledge diffusion is sluggish and

distorted. Only specialized lawyers seem able to parse the specifics of statutory and

regulatory authority, making it difficult to know which officials to blame or praise. The

logic linking revenue systems with expenditure demands is largely mysterious and quite

tortured.

At all governance levels, among the many important actors will be legions of NGOs,

unions, researchers, and philanthropies.

These governmental and nongovernmental entities have levels of capacity ranging from

deeply expert to profoundly amateur.

The great majority of NGOs, researchers, and foundations focus on a small number of

policy areas, and only a few work at all levels of governance.

The NGOs are loathe to be “led” or coordinated. It seems that in education, as in several

other areas, this is an age of fractured and entrepreneurial social change, rather than

movements.

Relatedly, like-minded NGOs are often competing with one another for funding, public

attention, and influence. Such competition encourages emphasis on points of difference

rather than shared values and areas of fundamental agreement.

Funders are fickle, as foundation staff come and go along with their strategic plans, and

wealthy individual philanthropists make big, splashy, often faddish bets.

These considerations should inform the design of a movement, understood as a broadly

active collection of change agents with shared values, goals, and strategies. In education reform,

there can be neither a messiah nor strong organizational discipline. Indeed, it is difficult to

imagine a process for creating a legitimate set of acknowledged leaders, or a short list of

immediate policy objectives. There are good reasons to consider a movement infeasible, and

perhaps implausible.

But, suspending disbelief, we can hypothesize some likely features of a movement design.

The policy agenda must be capacious rather than focused, reflecting both the varied purposes of

key movement constituents and the comprehensive breadth of the needed reforms. The design

must anticipate focused submovements and quasi-movements defined by issue concern or

delimited by jurisdiction. Current examples include early-childhood education programs, state

finance equity litigation, disability rights, Common Core State Standards, English language

learners, community schools, and racially disproportionate student discipline. Hubs will address

each of these topics, and many more. Most of these efforts, however, are driven by policy elites,

or a particular subset of constituents. I am not aware of any example, in even a single district, of a

sustained mass engagement comparable to the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s,

1 I use “reform” in its common, capacious sense: change in pursuit of improvement. In education policy circles, there

are continuing efforts to appropriate the term by actors who support charter schools, quasi-market incentives, and

sharp reductions in the influence of teacher unions.

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the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, or even the antiglobalization movement of the 1990s.

This despite the trope that education is the human rights issue of our time (along with climate

change, LGBT rights, human trafficking, and the Gini coefficient). Prescribing mass mobilization

as the cure for the ailments of public education is a formula for frustration, if not hopelessness.

PEEC’s distinctive design reflects the complex ecosystem. (See Figure 3.) For the

movement to succeed, its leadership must be decentralized, distributed, and fluid; funding must

come from multiple national, regional, and local sources. This design matches PEEC’s

comprehensive agenda and national scope, and also insulates the evolving movement from the

dictates of a few strong-willed foundations or philanthropists. While acknowledging and

embracing the complexity of the agenda, PEEC must also adopt the principle that multiple

priorities need not lead to competing priorities. This is more than a matter of culture or mindset

within and among NGOs. It is a prescription for a certain architecture of coalitions and

engineering of collaboration. It also reflects an important substantive proposition: the

comprehensive agenda has a great many elements, all of which must be in place eventually—but

not all of them, everywhere, at once. The order in which the elements are pursued is less about

some fixed and complex policy structure than it is about political and fiscal pragmatism.

Figure 3. Design considerations for a movement

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Much has been suggested about the possible applications of information technology and

social networking tools, but the role played by such methods in today’s education reform

ecosystem seems modest, decidedly a “version 1.0.” To the extent that tomorrow’s forum for

mass mobilization will take place in cyberspace, technology must play a key role in the

aggregation of participatory energy, the exchange of ideas, and—most important to a

transformation of advocacy—the binding mortar of community. Inevitably there is

complementary work in the realm of human affairs; tweets of passionate protest will at some

point urge that numbers of bodies show up in the city square. Someone with convening authority

has to call for the meeting. Someone has to suggest an agenda or facilitate developing one.

Someone has to be trusted to start the discussion and eventually end it. (All this was demonstrated

by the exhaustion associated with the Occupy movement.)

To the extent, however, that education reform remains primarily the work of elites and

policymakers, the engineering challenge is less about bandwidth and more about egos. Reform-

by-elites is less about viral videos than about viral ideas.

Taking all of this into account, and in the light of the numerous interviews we conducted

over the twelve months following publication of the commission’s report, the structure we

propose is a network of hubs, organized by policy area or geography (see Figure 4). Each hub will

consist of interested organizations—participants—operating as masters of their own destiny rather

than franchisees of some centralized authority. The chief design challenge is to make effective

leadership of a networked movement possible without introducing a discomfiting hierarchy. The

model for this, familiar in the business world, is a partnership.

Figure 4. Potential hubs by policy area and geography

A partner in this context is an organization that makes a commitment, substantially

beyond that of an ordinary participant, to be a co-venturer in building and nurturing the enterprise.

Specifically, each partner will execute a memorandum of understanding declaring its obligations:

what hubs it will help launch or sustain; what connections or pipes it will operate between which

particular hubs; what support services or technical assistance it will provide to particular

participants and hubs. Although there will be a small PEEC staff to discharge largely ministerial

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functions, the commitment of each partner is, fundamentally, to the other partners. The initial set

of partners is drawn from former members of the national commission. See Figure 5.

Participants The broad and inclusive group of participants in this undertaking

will be those organizations and individuals who, having considered

the consensus offered by the commission, see a substantial degree

of alignment with their own values and work. This group is

conceived as a coalition of the willing. As an initial matter, there is

no centrally decreed litmus test for participation save one: a

willingness to attempt collaborative work with others with whom

there will inevitably be differences. Active participation consists of

interaction and ultimately collaboration with others in one or more

hubs.

HubsA hub is a group of participants interacting in person and via

technology, with membership based on geography, a policy issue,

or both. In general, a place-based hub will focus on developing and

executing a policy-change strategy. The goals will be policy

changes at scale. An issue hub, by contrast, will be principally

about building intellectual capital to inform policy, advocacy, and

practice; it will be some form of “learning community,” including

both researchers and practitioners. The character of one place-

based hub may be a fully functioning, durable coalition that

directly generates action. Another, less ambitious group may be

little more than an information exchange.

Issue caucusesAn issue caucus is collection or network of NGOs and others who

want a community with a shared interest. In several cases, these

will be pre-existing networks that decide they want to be

connected to this movement-building enterprise. An early example

is the National Coalition for Community Schools.

PipesPipes provide bidirectional connections between hubs to support

communication and collaboration. Pipes will be actively staffed

rather than reliant on passive technology.

Partners

(service)

A set of organizations will be recruited to provide hubs and hub

participants with particular services, such as: law-related support,

such as advocacy litigation and statutory/regulatory analysis and

drafting; advice on communication strategy; social networking and

other technologies; training and strategy for community

organizing; and data analysis and applied research.

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Figure 5. Proposed structure for a movement to advance education excellence for all

Ideally, this work by partners will be uncompensated, as in-kind or pro bono contributions

to movement building. In many cases, and especially in the early years, the commitment of a

partner will be contingent on grant or contract funding. By leveraging the expertise and capacity

of partners, PEEC can maintain a small footprint and the low visibility appropriate for

infrastructure.

This layer of purposive coordination is constructed underneath a far more populated layer

of NGOs and other actors within this enormously complex ecosystem of often-rivalrous advocacy

and service organizations and resource-starved researchers. There are places and issues for which

well-functioning coalitions or networks already exist. It is important to minimize the amount of

real or perceived competition with these efforts by making common cause with them. It would be

wasteful and counterproductive for the partners to displace the good work of others. These

alliances should not be difficult to construct if the nascent movement is steadfast in its

commitments to low visibility and inclusivity, while mobilizing services, technical assistance, and

connections to attract participants.

That connectivity is second only to the partnership model as a key engineering feature of

the movement building. In the world of NGOs, there are two common forms of coordination and

networking. The intensive form consists of regular meetings, while the extensive form has usually

been limited to passive websites containing bulletin boards and hyperlinks. Beyond these, PEEC

will have an intentional strategy to actively identify which hubs should be connected with each

other and for what purposes. There will be designated staff—pipe builders—within the partners

(and PEEC) to initiate, maintain, and evaluate these connections. The same staff will also have

responsibility for connecting each hub to needed services provided by the partners or PEEC

contractors.

The movement’s engineering features are summarized in the next section.

The Movement Startup

Several foundations have agreed to support the initial phase of this PEEC effort, which will test

whether the movement strategy described here can succeed at this moment, given the state of

public education and of U.S. socio-political culture. But even though these funders express

confidence in the architecture and engineering of the movement, and confidence in the policy

consensus it will champion, there is some puzzlement about where to begin.

Partners

(network)

Each hub will have one or more partner organizations, specifically

recruited, to facilitate its creation, operation, and connection

through pipes to the rest of the network. This role will be more or

less substantial depending on the capacity of that hub’s

participants.

Partner

memoranda of

understanding

A negotiated memorandum of understanding with each partner will

detail the responsibilities of that organization to the network.

Specifically, the document will explain the hubs for which the

partner organization will serve as “godparent” or what services the

partner will provide to whom.

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The most common advice, coming on the heels of the commission’s work, was to make a

substantial investment in disseminating the recommendations and recruiting endorsers. The fact-

based clarion call can be echoed in detailed versions tailored to the facts of particular

jurisdictions; the comprehensive framework of policy ideas can be packaged in a way that is

responsive to the context of reform in a particular state or even school district.

After further analysis, challenging questions arise. The scale of this undertaking makes it

difficult for a small staff, likely to have only a few million dollars at its disposal, to overcome

inertia and achieve liftoff. Because of the impressive provenance of the recommendations,

endorsers could be recruited, but what benefit would they receive and what would they be asked

to do? For overcommitted and under-resourced NGO leaders, where is the compelling value

proposition? For philanthropists, especially foundations in the thrall of management consultants,

what measurable outcomes seem promising and possible?

An alternative hypothesis emerged. Rather than launch a movement with broadcast

marketing, begin with individualized efforts to recruit partners. These co-venturers will of course

be endorsers of the policy platform. But they will also endorse the movement design and commit

to investing their efforts in creating the network and sustaining it. Partners can provide a breadth

of leadership and be force multipliers to accelerate the construction of hubs and pipes. With

respect to the goal of populating hubs with participants, the hypothesis is, “Build them and they

will come.”

Apart from organizations represented on the commission, early treatment should include

organizations with important expertise or leadership roles in existing coalitions and networks. Still

another group will be organizations with interest capacity to launch hubs that hold special interest

for funders or have particular political importance for movement building.

For example, the Alliance for Excellent Education is a policy advocacy group based in

Washington, DC. It is an early partner, with its initial contribution to the network in two forms at

the heart of its expertise and impressive reputation. First, the alliance is using its convening power

to help launch an issue-based hub focused on the challenges of implementing the Common Core

State Standards, including concerns related to equity. Second, the alliance is well-known for its

sophisticated use of web-based communications and social networking technologies. As a partner,

it will provide these “movement technologies” to a certain number of hubs. The Southern

Education Foundation (SEF) is another example. Its roots dating to 1865, SEF has long been a

leading voice for education equity in throughout the Southeast. As another early partner, SEF will

play a leadership role across the region for place-based hubs, as well as a hub addressing shared

regional concerns. The Education Law Center (ELC) was represented on the commission by its

president, David Sciarra. ELC achieved national prominence for its landmark school finance

reform litigation in New Jersey and the effectiveness of the legislative and judicial remedies it

won. An early partner, ELC will help organize an issue-based hub on school finance reform,

building on the loose network of lawyers and researchers in this field. ELC will also work with its

colleagues to provide technical assistance on legal and implementation matters to interested place-

based hubs. No element of the PEEC agenda is more central than teachers and the profession. The

Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation is a relatively new organization that provides

accreditation for programs which account for over 70 percent of new teachers each year. The

council will lead a hub on teacher training, professional development, and evaluation. The goal is

to formulate advocacy and implementation plans for several specific policy measures that will

strengthen and elevate the profession in directions aligned with the commission recommendation.

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As a final example, the Coalition for Community Schools has over two hundred affiliates

around the country. Its leadership has agreed to be an early partner, giving its affiliates access to

the PEEC network and vice versa. In addition, the coalition will help establish an issue hub on

“integrated services to support student success”—a learning community of researchers and

practitioners intended to build intellectual capital and best practices models, all to be shared with

interested hubs. In particular, this group hopes to drive forward the idea of providing wraparound

services, school-based or otherwise, at scale as a means of mitigating the effects of poverty.

The number of hubs and participants will grow as dozens of partners work in concert to

expand the network. The infrastructure strategy requires, however, that hub participants derive

important benefits from their participation. This give-and-get exchange, within the movement-

building hypothesis, will help engage participant organizations and provide the thick set of

connections needed so that the ecosystem can develop into a distinctive form of community,

eventually becoming a movement. Although the terms of this “exchange” will undoubtedly

evolve, the preliminary characterization of benefits from the perspective of participants includes

the following:

Support for consensus-building and information-sharing on policy issues, research

agendas, advocacy campaigns, and communications strategies; coalition development

Organized subcommunities of learning and practice

Communications, tailored and as-needed, including basic messaging that will meet hub

partner-demands for a user-friendly, evidence-based resource for advancing equity and

excellence; tools, training, and convenings to educate and persuade

Internal capacity-building in a wide range of operational and substantive domains,

drawing on PEEC staff resources but especially those of partners

Advice and training in community organizing

Connectedness among hub participants, including shared vision and policy goals;

opportunities for coalition activity; learning communities around particular policy issues

or research; Web-based communication, social networking, and convening

Connectedness with the network of other hubs, providing two-way sharing, learning, and

collaboration; ultimately, a sense of identity as a movement

Policy engineering and technical assistance to advance changes in public policy at all

levels of government and education administration

A platform for concerted action

None of this can come to pass without philanthropy. That no single change agent or funder

can be active across the entire range of challenges underscores the importance of the plural,

distributed model of networked place-based and issue-based hubs. Just as NGO participants will

be able to see their own mission within the broad framework of policy principles, and their work

aligned with the polestar, many foundations in the education field should be able to see that some

pieces of our movement-building endeavor fit with that foundation’s funding strategy.

PEEC’s Distinctiveness

Several characteristics of PEEC and its strategy, together, make the project distinctive. Most

important, PEEC will focus on infrastructure operating in the background. It will not be

competing for the megaphone or for media attention. Its job is to help make partners and

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participants in the network more effective and ultimately successful. The second characteristic is

the partnership form itself, in which PEEC solidifies and expands the commission’s

unprecedented coalition of reformers, scholars, human rights leaders, union leaders, advocates,

and public officials. PEEC will identify collaborators and joint venturers who will contribute

expertise, capacity, in-kind support, and leadership to movement building. Where an important

element of the strategy can be executed by a partner organization, the core PEEC staff will simply

ensure that the partner’s work is connected to the broader undertaking and lend what support

resources permit.

In addition to partners, PEEC will identify a growing community of allies who formally

endorse the PEEC program principles and values and lend their support—moral, political, and

informational—to our work. PEEC will recruit civil society organizations, business leaders,

scholars, and even governmental entities to make the case that the stakes involved in universal

education excellence affect every corner of the nation and the future of each one of us.

Third, the strategy is more than dissemination or networking. An important and explicit

mission of the network of hubs is to build a broad, collaborative community of change agents

with not just an aspirational vision but a shared, comprehensive, and evidence-based battle plan.

Only in this way can the broad work of reform be sustainable and ultimately successful. It may be

that all politics is local, but something more is necessary in our splintered education system. The

ambition, scope, financing, and governance defined in the PEEC policy principles must transcend

the perspective of any single locale or state—especially if we insist on lifting even children in

communities that lack political and economic resources. The work must be at all levels of

education administration and policymaking.

Fourth, in addition to geographical breadth, PEEC is distinctive in the breadth and

comprehensiveness of its policy agenda. Every existing NGO has a narrower substantive focus.

This focus reflects the traditional preference of philanthropists, the reality of organizational

capacity, and the importance to individual leaders, researchers, and education officials of a clear

path toward prominence and success. In sharp contrast, PEEC begins with the extraordinary

consensus reflected in the commission report and the stature of the commission members and the

organizations they lead. Their diversity in expertise and perspective produced recommendations

that are pragmatic and comprehensive. That breadth is crucial because movement building must

overcome the culture and incentives that promote competition.

Finally, PEEC is distinctive because it will leverage the stature and indispensable role of

the former commission members, plus new partners, in all of our work. No other effort has this

uniquely valuable asset.

What Will Success Look Like?

It may be helpful to identify some indicators of intermediate and ultimate success. Most

obviously, we should judge the prospects for movement building quite bright if within a few years

there are dozens of partners, scores of hubs, and a dizzying array of active pipes connecting them.

In keeping with the idea that the network, or movement, should be vibrant and nonhierarchical,

.there will be a distribution in the “quality” of hubs, and each will have its own agenda, character,

and evolutionary path. A further measure of successful movement building would be the number

of partnership MOUs, since these memorialize the obligations, in-kind contributions, and

compensation agreements that give the movement energy, leadership, and other nonfinancial

capital.

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More difficult to define and discern are affective indicators demonstrating that participants

have a heightened sense of belonging and membership in a nourishing and even inspiring

community of people and organizations with shared commitments to very fundamental values and

goals. An individual actor should be able to understand his or her work in relation to the rest of

battles being waged by everyone else, but that understanding should empower rather than

engender feelings of insignificance, marginalization, or hopelessness. To continue the martial

metaphor, as the army moves forward, following the polestar, there will be many battles and

countless skirmishes fought by allies, some of them close, some of them distant, all of them

recognizable as comrades in the larger scheme of things.

It is tempting to measure success by reference to policy impact or changes in student

outcomes. One might borrow from the terminology of testing and assessment, however, and

conclude that these ideal performance measures lack construct validity because they confound the

judgment of movement building with the complexity of important exogenous factors in politics

and the economy. In other words, it seems important to admit the possibility that a movement

becomes all that we might hope but is blocked by even more powerful movements, ideologies,

and circumstances. At least for a time. For example, a fabulous movement might be stymied by a

recession, or legislative gridlock arising from unrelated conflicts. Often, national legislation is

stalled or killed because a few individuals in Congress are powerful enough to prevent the

majority from working its will. These and many other factors could be beyond the influence of an

education excellence-for-all movement.

That said, this movement must be a long-term venture, and PEEC’s hypothesis about how

best to build a movement should be judged by whether a revenue model can be found to expand

and maintain infrastructure, whether the network of collaborative, hub communities expands

steadily because its benefits attract participants, and whether the substantive vision continues to

guide and inspire.